


If Only the Flowers Will Wither

by Eavenne



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Anger, Angst, Gen, Pain, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 01:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15831372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eavenne/pseuds/Eavenne
Summary: Basch wonders why nothing's changed.





	If Only the Flowers Will Wither

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: References to violently taking out your feelings on your physical surroundings.

When Basch steps forward, the grasses curve, cushion-like, under his feet.

His chest struggles to expand in a brave attempt to breathe. Yet hardly anything inflates his defeated lungs. It’s barely a whisper of air.

His eyes wander pointlessly, scouring the grass for a misshapen blade, scrutinising the flowers for one petal too many – 

But he sees nothing. Overhead the black birds scatter carelessly from the trees, soaring against the sky like a sea of pupils in a sea of blue eyes. The world before him is caught in time, frozen like an old photograph, trapped in a painting. It’s alive – it shudders in a cage, claws at glass, and growls to be let out. He watches it dimly. It’s as though he’s a million miles away. 

Yesterday the world had made sense to him. Yesterday his knuckles were still the colour of his skin. This morning he slammed them into his mirror till the glass broke and his fists were blood-bruised. The bandages he slapped hastily over them won’t make his wounds heal – they’re meant to hide them instead. 

To make it seem like nothing’s changed.

The world’s certainly the same, and so is the park, and so are the trees, and the birds, and the grass. Yesterday the flowers were nodding playfully in the breeze – they nod on today, but now there’s nothing to laugh about. There’s nothing to look forward to. For now there’s no one to pick up after a long day of work, to smile at him in the kitchen doorway when he wakes up late, to look into his eyes and understand him better than he’s ever understood himself.

His home is a mess of shattered plates and shattered glass. Yesterday he’d bought expensive cheese – it’s rotting on the floor now, for he’s lost the person he’d wanted to eat it with. There’s a knife in a wall, a bullet trembling in a loaded gun. Sooner or later they’ll find their way into his chest. And when that happens, time will part around him like a river flowing past a rock and ebb on, abandoning him in the past.

It happened to his sister when she died yesterday. 

Why is the sky still blue? Why are the flowers still blooming? She’s dead and everything beautiful should die with her. She’s dead and he doesn’t understand how the people walking by can still smile. How can they laugh? How can they pretend that nothing’s happened? She was here, just yesterday, smiling and talking and walking and breathing, so how dare they –

Maybe this is all a dream. Maybe she’s waiting for him at home. Maybe the lifeless girl he’d found in her room hadn’t been her at all. Maybe she…

He can’t breathe. 

No one notices that he’s barely standing – and so the world moves on, thoughtlessly, scarcely pausing to regard the people it’s leaving behind.

If only –

If only the flowers will wither.

Then maybe they’ll remember the girl they’re forgetting.


End file.
